by Clare Empson
She stands up, passing the baby to me.
‘I was going to make bacon sandwiches, and then we can go to the park.’
‘Sounds good. I’m starving.’
It’s only once she’s gone that I take in the retractable washing line, hung with a neat row of sleepsuits, all white, the colour Hannah likes Samuel in best. Eight babygros stretched out by pegs, drying in the midday sunshine, and at the end of them a teddy bear. There is a threatening tightness in my chest as I walk towards the line and unclip the bear, a sodden toy that now smells not of Alice’s perfume and old times but of Persil.
I walk into the kitchen where Hannah is frying bacon, Samuel under one arm, the wet bear in the other.
‘You washed the bear.’
She turns around from the cooker, smiling.
‘Yes, and I cut off its eyes. They’re lethal, those glass ones. I’m going to embroider some black ones on instead.’
‘You cut off its eyes?’
I put Samuel down on his sheepskin rug as carefully as I can. And then I stand in the middle of the room, damp bear clutched to my chest, while the years drop away. This bear was mine. This ruined, disfigured bear belonged to me back in the days when I belonged to Alice. The days when Alice cared about me the way she now cares about Samuel.
I am struggling to breathe and there’s a pain in my chest, sharp and insistent. I collapse onto my knees, arms wrapped around myself.
‘Luke?’ Hannah says, but she sounds distant, as if I’m underwater.
Her voice becomes shrill, frightened.
‘What’s happening? What’s going on?’
The pressure in my chest is so strong I feel as if my lungs might explode. A panic attack. I’ve had them before, but not for years. Not since Hannah.
Breathe in, hold and count to four, breathe out. One two three four. I know the routine.
‘I think this bear was mine,’ I say, kneeling up as soon as I can, surprised by the wetness on my cheeks. I hadn’t realised I was crying.
Hannah takes the bear from me and strokes its wet, matted fur, a gesture of unbearable tenderness.
‘This is about Alice, isn’t it?’
‘I’m not coping with it, H. I feel like I’ve barely got to know her in all this time. You seem to get on better with her than I do.’
‘That’s only because we’re women, we bond in the way that women do. And we’ve got the art thing, that’s all.’
‘No, it’s more than that. There is a disconnect between me and Alice, I’m sure of it. I feel like all she cares about is Samuel and maybe you, a little bit.’
‘Oh babe.’ Hannah squeezes my hand so hard it’s almost painful. ‘This is so tough on you, isn’t it? But Samuel is a baby who needs looking after. And Alice is wonderful with him, but it doesn’t mean she cares about him more than you.’
‘You’re right,’ I say, thinking: you’re always right. Thinking: why can’t things ever be as straightforward for me?
‘What just happened? Was that a panic attack?’
‘I think so. I used to have them when I first started my job. Stress basically.’
‘Is this about Spirit? And Reborn?’
‘It’s partly the whole Alice thing. But also there’s so much pressure at work. I’m worried Michael is going to take Spirit away from me.’
‘In my bones I know that’s not going to happen,’ Hannah says. ‘And I’m not going to let you ruin your weekend stressing about it. Come on, can’t we enjoy being together, just the three of us?’
‘Welcome to Nappy Valley,’ the estate agent said when we signed the contract, which made me want to rip up the paperwork then and there. But he had a point. We merge into the background wallpaper, my micro family and I, as we reach the new souped-up playground on the common, hailed by shrieks of joy.
Here on a Saturday afternoon, the weekend dads are out in force, the loud, look-at-me ones in their off-duty shirts. Something in the City probably and unable to blend, weaned on a diet of competition and self-belief, they talk as if to instruct the entire playground.
‘Well done, Pandora, see if you can get to the next bar. I know you can.’
Five-year-old Pandora is being forced across the monkey bars, failure not an option. She’ll rise to the top, wrenched all the way, unless she’s like me, the definitive square peg, a wimp at the monkey bars and all that followed.
But we have a campaign of our own this afternoon. Samuel has just started sitting up and Hannah wants to try him out in the baby swings. All four swings are taken, a trio of babies and one oversized three-year-old whom I resist the urge to eyeball. Get out of the swing, kid.
While we wait, we watch, still new enough to the whole scene to be fascinated by playground dynamics. One mother counts to ten each time she pushes her baby in the swing – one, two, three, four – and moments later the mother next to her starts counting too, vacuumed into the land of tiger parents without even realising it.
A swing becomes vacant and we lower Samuel into it, fixing both tiny hands onto the bar in front. His face creases with confusion. What? Why? And when we give him a gentle push, oh so small, momentum too minuscule for the naked eye, he continues to stare at us with a furious hauteur, as if the whole thing is beneath him. But then Hannah pushes the swing a little harder – ‘See, it’s meant to be fun,’ she says – and I wonder if soon he, like me, will believe everything that comes out of this woman’s lovely mouth. If she says it’s fun then it must be. There’s a widening of those dark brown eyes on the upward swing, an anxious brow on the return journey, this the roller-coaster ride of a six-month-old. Then suddenly he gets it and he’s doing his belly laugh. And the woman next to us, the unwitting tiger mother, starts laughing too.
‘Isn’t it amazing when they start to laugh?’ she says.
She’s blonde and pretty, wearing a floaty white top, jeans and New Balance trainers, a classic Clapham mum, a few years older than us probably. She and Hannah start talking and it turns out that our babies are just a few months apart and Sarah lives on the next-door street. I feel Hannah’s radar zipping up. Since returning to work, she worries she’s missing out. On her days off, she’ll wheel Samuel up to Starbucks and sit there with her solitary latte next to a gathering of intimate, laughing stay-at-home mums, wishing she could join them. But theirs is a different world, with their day-in, day-out meets at the library and the park and the music class. The doors are closed, Hannah an outsider looking in.
‘Trouble is, you can’t have it both ways,’ Christina said when Hannah mentioned she hadn’t become friends with any local mothers. And I remember thinking: but why not?
While Hannah and Sarah talk, I take over the swing-pushing, rewarded each time by Samuel’s laughter. I push him higher, nothing controversial, but this boy is a daredevil, and the harder I push, the harder he laughs.
‘He’s a thrill-seeker,’ I say, returning to the conversation, and Hannah says, ‘Well, just look at the parents.’
Sarah says, ‘I’ve seen your baby before in the library. Only he was with an older woman. I noticed her first, she’s tall and glamorous, impossible to miss. Is that your nanny? I remember thinking how fantastic she was with the baby – actually, I thought he was hers and she was one of those older mums you see around.’
‘That’s Alice,’ I say with the complicated blend of emotions that always accompanies this statement.
‘Well, you’re very lucky. She had him on her lap and she was opening and shutting books and he was roaring with laughter. It was mesmerising. It’s his laugh just now that reminded me. She seems great, where did you find her?’
The seconds before I speak feel paralysing, but Sarah doesn’t seem to notice.
‘She’s a friend,’ I say, and Hannah jumps in with, ‘Do you fancy meeting for a coffee on one of my days off?’
‘I’d love to,’ Sarah says,
fishing her mobile out of her bag to exchange numbers.
As soon as they’ve made a plan to meet, Hannah scoops Samuel out of the swing and we say goodbye.
‘See you next week.’
‘Bye, Hannah. Bye, Luke. Bye, CHAR-LIE.’ Sarah laughs, pleased with herself. ‘I remembered his name without you telling me.’
‘Oh, actually, he’s Samuel,’ Hannah says, voice casual, as though this small slip-up means nothing, as though it isn’t the first solid evidence of what I have suspected all along.
Then
Alice
Pregnancy is a time of intense romance for Jake and me. My second trimester, when I feel extraordinarily well, coincides with a period of successive power cuts, and we live by candlelight. Jake always has thirty or forty candles burning in the sitting room, stuffed into wine bottles with wicker casings or the battered candelabras he collects from Golborne Road. Now we bathe by candlelight too if there is enough hot water, and if there isn’t, we go to bed early and he reads to me, book in one hand, candle in the other, held close to his face like a Dickensian protagonist.
Sometimes he reads poetry – not Blake or Keats or Coleridge, but the lyrics of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, James Brown. There is one song in particular that he reads more than any other on these nights, Dylan’s ‘The Man in Me’. When you hear Dylan singing this song, it is elevated to something heartrending and insightful, the story of a woman who comprehends all the things her lover tries to hide; flat on the page the words look surprisingly schmaltzy, but its message is not lost on me.
Night after night we stay in together, working or lying on the sofa listening to records. And I get used to it, this intense domesticity, a new grown-up-ness to our lives. Arriving home from college to the scent of something Jake is cooking for our supper: a Bolognese he has simmered for hours, lasagne to rival the one we loved in Siena, the fish stew, which means a trip to Billingsgate. He keeps a bowl filled with apples and oranges and encourages me to eat as many pieces of fruit as I can. He buys a baby book that details every stage of the first year of your child’s life, and while I have an extended bath, refilling it for as long as our hot water lasts, he will read out sections from it.
‘He’ll be laughing by the time he’s twelve weeks old.’ Or, ‘When he’s seven months he’ll be crawling and trying to pull himself up on the furniture.’
There is no question in Jake’s mind that we’re having a boy. I hope he won’t be disappointed if it turns out to be a girl.
As Christmas approaches I feel hurt that my mother still hasn’t tried to get in touch. My parents don’t know I am pregnant and I cannot face telling them, I can imagine my father’s rage and I won’t sully our happiness with it. Instead I send them a card I’ve made myself, a schmaltzy, hand-painted winter scene, the kind of thing they like. Inside I write the most innocuous message I can manage.
Dear Mum and Dad, hope you have a good Christmas. Love from Alice.
But nothing comes back. They know my address; I had to give it to them so my post could be diverted here. It would have been easy for my mother to send a card in return. But she is in thrall to her husband’s diktat just as she always was and always will be. And my father never goes back on his word. He made me choose – Jake rather than them – and mostly I am glad that he did.
Naturally, Jake goes into overdrive with his Christmas preparations. We buy a tree and he lugs it home single-handedly, its tip trailing along the pavement. He won’t allow me to carry anything ‘because of the baby’, even though we’ve both read the books and have learned that essentially I am meant to carry on exactly as before. In Berwick Street market we find coloured lights and baubles and tinsel and we pile them on the tree so that hardly a single strand of spruce can be seen.
‘It’s a disco tree,’ Jake says when we turn the lights on for the first time and discover they flash on and off. ‘Very now. Very seventies.’
I’ve taken so much trouble over his presents for this, our first Christmas together. In the Record and Tape Exchange I find a Jimi Hendrix single, an original pressing of ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ from 1967, with ‘Highway Chile’ on the other side. It was expensive, which I’d expected; after Jimi’s death, his records quadrupled in price overnight. But worth it just to see Jake’s face when he opens it.
One lunchtime I take Rick to Liberty with me, an old-fashioned Christmas paradise with beautifully decorated trees on every level, themed in silver and white, the opposite of our cut-price disco extravaganza.
‘So what’s it going to be? Jewellery? Scarf? Shirt? Watch?’ Rick asks.
‘He has all of that. I’d like to give him something he can wear every day that reminds him of me. For when he’s away on tour.’
‘Why don’t you get him some aftershave?’
The lady at the fragrance counter is dismissive at first. Rick and I are dressed in our paint-spattered art-student clothes – lemon-yellow dungarees for him, a loose white top and flares for me – and she clearly thinks we have no money. But I have been saving my student grant with exactly this intention, to splash out on something perfect for my lover.
When I reach for a bottle of Eau Sauvage – price £7 – the woman seems more interested. Rick dabs it on his wrist and holds it out for me to smell.
‘Bloody gorgeous, isn’t it? I wish someone would give it to me. Maybe you could drop a hint to Tom.’
‘It’s not Jake, though. It’s too … I don’t know, suit and tie.’
The shop assistant laughs.
‘So what’s he like, your boyfriend?’
I get a little lost in my description.
‘Well, he’s tall and thin, with long dark hair and a romantic kind of face, angelic, a bit like a Botticelli painting.’
Rick is tittering, though the woman manages to keep a straight face.
‘He’s a musician, a singer and songwriter. He’s artistic. He wears shirts with bell sleeves and velvet suits and lots of scarves and jewellery.’
‘He might like a unisex fragrance?’
‘Nothing too feminine,’ I say.
‘But frankly nothing too masculine either,’ adds Rick, and this time the woman joins in with our laughter.
‘How about something Italian?’ she asks, and Rick and I, in unison, cry, ‘Perfect!’
‘He’s obsessed with Italy. We both are. We spent the summer outside Florence.’
She produces a beautiful turquoise bottle with a cobalt-blue lid.
‘This is Acqua di Parma, a cologne. Very fashionable in Italy and worn by women just as much as men.’
Rick and I inhale deeply.
‘Wonderful, smells like ferns,’ Rick says, ‘and lemons and cedar trees.’
‘It’s exactly right for him,’ I say, opening my purse to find the right amount of cash.
We wake up late on Christmas morning (no church, another luxury) and Jake insists on bringing me breakfast in bed: cappuccinos in polystyrene cups and fat slices of panettone from Bar Italia, which stays open every day of the year.
‘On the house with Luigi’s love,’ he says, getting in beside me.
He lifts the blankets and inches down to kiss my stomach.
‘Happy Christmas to you, baby,’ he says.
He counts up the months on his fingers.
‘Next Christmas you’ll be six months old. Imagine that. I wonder if we’ll still be here in this flat.’
‘We’ll never leave Soho, surely?’
‘Never. I can promise you that. Unless we move to Italy.’
It is a perfect day, just the two of us. While a chicken is roasting, we listen to classical music, Brahms first, his violin concerto, and then Vivaldi’s Gloria. It reminds me of my father for a moment – anything choral and churchy always does – but I push away the image of my parents sitting down to a turkey alone. My father hogging an expensive bottle of win
e, my mother cowering as he pours his third, fourth, fifth glass and the spectre of incandescence rears its head.
‘What were your Christmases like as a kid?’ I ask, without thinking, and beside me Jake goes still.
‘Well, that depends on where I was. Sometimes it was just me and my mum on our own and that was fine. But usually we were at my grandparents’ farm and quite often my mum left me there alone. She liked to get the sun at Christmas if she could afford it; she went to Spain, Morocco, the Canary Islands.’
I can sense the change in his breathing, and my own heart begins to pulse in return. I reach for his hand.
‘I’m never going to ask you to talk about things you don’t want to talk about.’
‘I know that.’
‘But sometimes I think it might help you to exorcise the past. And I would listen. I love you. And I want to help.’
‘All right,’ he says, and he gets up and walks over to our tree with its twinkling, flashing lights and its baubles the colours of Quality Street. He picks out a package, flat, square and wrapped in shiny red paper.
I read the tag: For you, Alice, with all my love.
Inside there’s a framed photograph, an instant bullet to the heart. It is a school portrait of Jake aged nine or ten, a beautiful boy with short hair and solemn eyes. He is wearing a grey V-necked jumper, a white shirt and red and grey striped tie, and the thing that strikes me most about this picture, this textbook, cheesy school picture, is his refusal to smile.
‘I found this photo and thought you might like it. I know you’re curious about when I was a kid.’ He leans forward to kiss my face.
‘I love it. You’re so beautiful,’ I say, looking at the photo. ‘But you don’t look very happy.’
‘Well I wasn’t.’
He gets up from the sofa and starts pacing around our tiny sitting room. I can hear the breaths he is taking, deep and longer than usual. My heart clenches in empathetic distress.
